


Episode -71: Back From the Future

by HopeStoryteller



Series: Cry for the World [2]
Category: MacGyver (TV 1985), Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Canon-Typical Behavior, Fake Episode, Fix-It of Sorts, Gen, Jack Dalton is mentioned, Prequel, Time Travel, Timeline Shenanigans, Typical Night Vale Weirdness, he's not actually here which is probably a good thing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-25
Updated: 2019-12-25
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:06:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21958585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopeStoryteller/pseuds/HopeStoryteller
Summary: I’ve been in some pretty strange situations over the years. Comes with the territory of working for the Phoenix Foundation and being friends with Pete Thornton and Jack Dalton, two extremes and equally crazy in very different ways.But this? This tops all of them.MacGyver spent yesterday thirty years in the future. He accidentally brought a high school kid back with him, the world might be scheduled to end in five days, and if he never has to hear the words "Night Vale" again it'll honestly be too soon. He really needs a nap, and possibly a therapist.
Relationships: Angus MacGyver (MacGyver TV 1985) & Peter Thornton
Series: Cry for the World [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1580779
Comments: 2
Kudos: 24
Collections: Clever Crossovers & Fantastic Fusions, Crossover Favorites





	Episode -71: Back From the Future

I’ve been in some pretty strange situations over the years. Comes with the territory of working for the Phoenix Foundation and being friends with Pete Thornton and Jack Dalton, two extremes and equally crazy in very different ways.

But this? This tops all of them. According to the man on the radio—Paolo continues to refer to him as both ‘Cecil’ and ‘the Voice of Night Vale’ and I’m not sure if that second thing is more than just a title—I may have spent yesterday thirty years in the future.

I also accidentally kidnapped a high schooler, and neither of us are sure how to get him back to his time. I’m not sure I want to get him back to his time, or that town. I would have thought I was hallucinating it all if I hadn’t accidentally brought him back with me.

But what happens to Paolo isn’t my decision. Which is why I’m at Phoenix now, and waiting for Pete to finish talking with Paolo and tell me what I need to do. There’s a distinct possibility that he’ll ask me to check myself into an insane asylum.

There’s a distinct possibility that I’ll take him up on it.

“He’s telling the truth,” Pete says, opening the door of his office and ushering the kid out. “What was the future like?”

I shrug. “Didn’t realize it was the future for most of it, if I’m being honest.”

“Time is pretty weird in Night Vale,” Paolo agrees. 

He’s taking this really, really well. Better than me, actually. He’d make a good operative if he wasn’t a kid and wasn’t displaced timewise at least a decade before he’s supposed to be born. 

“Literally everything is weird in Night Vale,” I say in response.

Paolo shrugs. “For you, maybe. Time’s weird even by our standards. I’m pretty sure my boss has been the radio host since the nineties at least. Never actually heard the guy before him but everyone says Cecil is much better.”

Pete raises an eyebrow, looks to me. I shrug, significantly more helplessly than Paolo.

“Do you think,” Pete asks, “that you can tune into this radio program from here?”

“Worth a shot.” 

Paolo pulls out some kind of device. He flips a switch, and it turns on.

“What happens when a cold war becomes hot? What happens when a cold war becomes even colder? Welcome to Night Vale.”

“That’s the same guy,” I say. “The same guy who somehow knew my every action and directly addressed me on air. He sounds exactly the same.”

“That’s Cecil,” Paolo agrees. “I guess he was on air in the eighties too.”

Pete looks at Paolo strangely, and asks, “How old is this man?”

Paolo makes a noncommittal noise. “He looks like he’s in his late twenties? Time’s weird in Night Vale. We try not to think about it too hard.”

Pete looks at me. I look at him. He opens his mouth to ask more questions.

Paolo shushes him and says, “It’s starting!”

By the end of the first bit of news, Pete’s looking at Paolo’s portable radio like it’s going to start breathing fire and attack him. Which, honestly, I wouldn’t discount at this point. Calling this town and everything from or in it weird is like saying Jack has questionable decision-making skills: the biggest understatement of my life.

Speaking of my life… where will I be in thirty years? Where will Pete be in thirty years? Where will Jack, or Mike, or anyone I know now be in thirty years?

Odds are I’ll either be dead or retired, so I’ve got that going for me.

“This town is definitely worth investigating further,” Pete says.

“No,” I reply before he can finish asking. Or start asking.

“Mac—“

“Don’t you dare ‘Mac’ me, I spent yesterday thirty years in the future and nearly got arrested for having a pencil in my glove compartment.”

“The secret police takes their ban on writing utensils very seriously,” Paolo says very seriously. “But things like markers or bits of charcoal are a grey area, if you need to take notes.”

I do the only thing I can: I bury my head in my hands.

Pete waits patiently. He knows me too well not to. But, more importantly, Pete waits silently, and Paolo just listens to the radio.

On the radio, Cecil starts to give a traffic report that appears to have no relation whatsoever to actual traffic reporting. Something about a town in Russia named Nulogorsk. I’ve never heard of it.

“Oh! Mr. Thornton,” Paolo says suddenly, “you wanted to know what happened in 1983. Nulogorsk was Night Vale’s... sister town, sort of? It was before my time.”

“What was before your time?” Pete asks, slowly and with no small amount of apprehension.

“I dunno. They never changed the year on their letters after 1983, so apparently Night Vale stopped responding. Something about not being able to talk about Michael Jackson’s latest hits. Some people thought maybe they were destroyed and only continued to exist in 1983? Which is this year.”

“Yes,” Pete says, “but what does that have to do with anything?”

I look at Paolo. If he’s trying to say what I think he’s trying to say, he might be onto something. And I have a hunch.

“Pete,” I say, “do we have any information on Nulogorsk and its surroundings?”

I don’t think Pete gets it yet. But if I’m right, he will. 

“I’ll check,” he says, and retreats back into his office.

Meanwhile, it takes Intern Paolo all of three seconds to turn down the radio and look at me expectantly.

“What?” I ask.

“So what does the vague, yet menacing government agency do?”

I sigh. Audibly. “First: the Phoenix Foundation. Not vague or menacing. Second: research.”

“Right.”

He draws out the word, squints at me suspiciously. If I were in his shoes, somehow, I wouldn’t blame him. For living in that town he’s surprisingly normal and un-traumatized.

“It’s confidential,” I say. “Why do people think Nulogorsk was destroyed this year?”

Paolo shrugs. “It’s the one thing most people agree with Simone Rigadeau on. She’s a transient living in the Earth Sciences Building of the community college, she’s been saying the world ended years ago for... years? As long as I can remember.”

There’s a sinking feeling in my gut now. I don’t know who this Simone Rigadeau is, but she might be onto something. Or I might be on a wild goose chase, but there’s something here. There has to be something here I can do.

“When did she start saying the world ended?” I ask, although I think I already know the answer.

“1983,” Paolo says. The color drains from his face as he comes to the same realization I have. Quieter, he asks, “What month is it?”

“September.”

“What...” He visibly gulps. “What day?”

“Uh... twenty-first?”

“We have five days until the world ends,” Paolo says. “Or at least until it does in an alternate version of this world? Time’s complicated. Space is worse.”

* * *

Pete’s info only solidified it: the Russians are planning to conduct nuclear tests just outside the tiny Russian fishing village of Nulogorsk. The world is apparently going to end in five days, possibly because of the tests scheduled in three days. And it’s my job to stop it.

At least I don’t have to worry about the kid from the future anymore. He’s Pete’s problem now, although a part of me does wonder what’s going to happen to him from here. He’s stranded, in a sense. Legally, he won’t exist for at least a decade. But he does handle strange better than even I do, so let’s put it this way: I won’t be surprised if I wind up working with him in the future. Just in the closer future, the post-high-school future and not the _thirty years in the future_ future.

The cargo plane I’ve smuggled myself onto goes through a rough patch. A box slides from one side of the hold to the other, and lets out a very human-sounding yelp.

So much for not having to worry about the kid from the future anymore. When I said I wouldn’t be surprised if I was working with him in the future, I didn’t mean this soon.

“Get out of there,” I call. “I know you’re here and you’re going to get hurt if that box keeps sliding.”

A head of curly black hair pokes up from the box, followed by a sheepish grin.

“Hi,” Paolo tries.

“You’re not supposed to be here.”

“Oh, I know. My parents were on birth control.” He frowns. “Wait, is birth control legal yet?”

“Not what I meant.”

“In my defense, I didn’t think leaving Night Vale would send us back from my time to yours either.”

“Also not what I meant, and you know that perfectly well.”

Paolo lets out a long-suffering sigh. 

“Mr. Thornton was going to send me back to school,” he says at last. 

“Not a fan of learning?”

“Learning, yes. The way things are taught in school, definitely not. Literally the entire reason I _got_ an internship at the radio station was so I’d get school credit for not being there, and half the time I wasn’t even doing anything and could work on classes online. And school outside Night Vale is even worse.”

“And the other half, you were doing… what, exactly?”

“Intern stuff. Getting coffee, letting Cecil know what’s going on outside the radio station, trying not to die.”

I must look pretty confused because Paolo quickly elaborates, “Interns tend to have a pretty high mortality rate. This is pretty tame as far as internship fates go. Leland got vaporized and Richard turned into a tree.”

It takes me a few to figure out a response to that, mainly because I’m _definitely_ not used to someone being this nonchalant about something this messed up, and I won’t be by the time I get this kid back to the good old US of A. Speaking of which…

“How does anyone live there?” I have to ask. “Stockholm syndrome?”

Paolo just shrugs. He’s saved from elaborating further by an alarm going off in the cockpit and the pilot—Phoenix agent, I’ve worked with him a few times before, definitely _not_ a certain friend of mine whose name begins with J and ends with Ack Dalton—yells something back to us.

“What?” I yell back. 

“Five minutes and counting, and I won’t be able to stick around long once we’re there!”

Right. I’m parachuting down. Which wouldn’t be a problem, except that we’ve only got two parachutes, I’m not letting the pilot fly without keeping one, and at this point I don’t trust Paolo on his own at all.

“Parachute’s in the crate over there,” I say, pointing. “We’ve only got one, so bring it over here and let’s take a look at the harness.”

The kid obediently does so. He asks, “We?”

“You’re going to follow me regardless, and this way I keep an eye on you and we don’t take the pilot’s chute. Except,” I frown at the parachute, “this is far less than I’d like to jump with on my own. We need to expand the harness. Take a look around, let’s see what I’ve got to work with. Throw any kind of cord over my way.”

The rope Paolo finds is far from ideal, but I’ll take rope burns over falling to my death any day and I suspect (or at least hope) he does too. Making the harness takes about a minute. Strapping both of us in for what could be charitably called a tandem skydive takes another three, and by then it’s almost time. 

“I hope you’re not afraid of heights,” I say as our pilot opens the cargo doors.

“Of course not,” Paolo says lightly. “Just falling from them.”

I laugh unhappily. “You know what? I’m saying that’s what I’m afraid of from now on. Let’s go.”

We jump.

* * *

“So, you speak Russian,” I mumble in English, tapping my fingers on the table. “Would have been nice to know earlier.”

Paolo grins sheepishly. “In my defense, I’m better at writing Russian than speaking it. We had to take a language in high school. Current options were Russian or Weird Spanish, I picked Russian.”

I open my mouth to ask what Weird Spanish is, then shut it. I’m not sure I want to know at this point.

“Fair enough. I took Spanish myself. Non-weird.” I clear my throat. “Anyway. The plan would be for you to stay here and me to handle this, except that somehow I doubt you’ll stay put if I tell you to.”

“Nope.”

Paolo’s still grinning. His answer’s really about what I expected. Lucky for him, I’ve already factored him into this, and the fact that both of us speak Russian helps. It would help more if he looked enough like me that I could plausibly claim he’s my kid or something.

He _really_ doesn’t look like me. I’m paler with brown hair, he’s darker with black hair. A couple of different physical traits I could explain away, but we want to avoid attention and attempting to convince people he’s adopted would attract far too much.

Also, I don’t remember the word for _adopted_ in Russian. So that plan’s out, although it could buy us some time if we get caught. The plan, however, is to not get caught to begin with.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “We’re going to need some supplies, and then we’re going to wait until dark. I’ll give you a list of the less suspicious stuff.”

* * *

“So, we’re defusing the bombs?” Paolo asks. “I’m assuming that’s what most of this is for, anyway.”

“Defusing them would raise too many questions, we’d never get out in time, and we might start World War Three,” I reply. “So: no. We’re not defusing them. What we’re doing is making sure they won’t carry out the nuclear tests they’re going to carry out in two days, because Pete thinks that _will_ cause World War Three in one way or another and at this point I’m not sure he’s wrong.”

Paolo looks strangely at his pack, and I sigh.

“We need to get inside, cause enough of a problem that they can’t test anything but not enough of one that they’re suspicious. Getting inside’s the hard part, once I’m in I can improvise, and you’re going to stay close to me and quiet. Most of that’s for getting inside.”

“Right.” He sucks in a breath. “Wire cutters I can understand, except that we don’t _have_ wire cutters, and the rest—”

“Sheep,” I say. “Help me herd them in the general direction of the fence, throw some corn their way to encourage them, it’ll be invisible in the grass but they’ll know it’s there.”

It isn’t until after we’ve gotten the sheep within range of the base and returned to a safer distance that Paolo snaps his fingers and makes a noise of understanding.

“They have cameras, or some kind of proximity sensors,” he says, “and we’re triggering them with the sheep. Sheep trigger them enough times, they won’t bother checking when we go in. Right?”

I’m… impressed. I didn’t think he’d get it at all.

“Right,” I reply, secretly pleased. “I thought you said you didn’t like school?”

“Definitely not in Night Vale. Probably not anywhere else. And school wouldn’t have made me think of that.”

“Maybe not,” I agree. “I’ll talk to Pete when we get back, see what we can do about some kind of homeschooling. I don’t think Phoenix does internships, but there’s probably something we can work out. You said you liked learning, right?”

“Just not the way schools do it. Science is neat.”

“We’ll work something out, I think Pete would have recruited you on the spot if you weren’t still a kid. Just don’t follow me on a mission next time, alright? It’s dangerous enough with just me.”

Paolo grins. “I won’t. I’m mostly here because I’m curious about what happened to Nulogorsk.”

An alarm blares within the base, and we both duck, all conversation brought to a halt. We’ll see how many times we need to bring the sheep in before they don’t even bother checking anymore.

* * *

It turns out to be eight times, and the sheep are still contentedly grazing away when we slip past them and up to the fence. Paolo dumps the rest of his corn for the sheep as I look through my bag for the towel, then look to Paolo.

He tosses it over. I climb the fence enough to reach the barbed wire and sling the towel over. It’s the thickest one either of us could find, and it should keep the barbed wire from being too problematic.

“Let’s go,” I say. “Close to me, and quiet.”

This _is_ a nuclear test site, but due to the people in charge being reasonably confident that they’ll catch anyone outside the base, the guard rotation is fairly lax. We’ve got twenty minutes to cause a stink and get out.

Causing a stink isn’t literal in this case, just setting a fire that won’t blow anything up and will appear fully accidental, and one that won’t hurt anyone. The door to the control room’s open. Pete wasn’t kidding when he said this, and Nulogorsk, was in the middle of nowhere.

As it happens, fertilizer is very, very flammable. And all it takes is one spark from the computer system nobody's monitoring.

* * *

The mission went off without a hitch. Nulogorsk had apparently disappeared from everyone’s records by the time we got back, but the world itself is fine, and at this point I’m too tired to care too much about a town that might just have become a new, bizarre Russian Night Vale.

If I never have to deal with Night Vale again, it’ll be too soon. But at least we got Paolo out of it, who I might actually be working with in the near-ish future. Or possibly not, depending on whether Pete decides he’ll be a field agent or in R&D.

He’s definitely sticking around with Phoenix, though. Which I don’t mind, he’s a good kid and he handles the weird much better than most. I’ll just be sticking around too, because while I know Pete will make sure he’s got all the credentials he needs, not all of the Foundation is quite that scrupulous.

Most of it is, though, so Paolo should be fine. Paolo, or… whatever he winds up going by.

I finish filling up my coffee cup—I really, _really_ need it—and listen in a bit more than I’m probably supposed to. If Pete minds, he doesn’t say as much, and I’m not convinced Paolo notices.

“I guess, if I have to change my name,” Paolo says at last, “I can go by my middle name. Maybe even make up a new backstory for myself. That’d be cool.”

Pete nods. I give them both a wave and head out for some dearly needed rest and relaxation. Before I do, I hear Pete say, “We’ll keep your surname, make your middle name your first. Sound good?”

“Sounds good. Um… I guess I’m Carlos from now on?”

I choke on my coffee. I know where I’ve heard _that_ name before.

**Author's Note:**

> I have nothing to say for myself except that it worked a little too well not to write. Also, sorry Mac, that coffee was probably pretty good. Merry Christmas Mom! Hope I didn't blow your mind too much!


End file.
